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Hey, what's up guys! welcome back to the lab!
I've got a very exciting DIY project for you today,
Because I'm going to show you how to dig down into the depths of the earth and make your own clay.
Now this project here was inspired a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a channel called Primitive
Technology. all about a guy in Australia who goes out into the woods and uses nothing
But the materials around him to build cool things like houses
Looms and even metal foundries and the basis for all of his experiments involved clay so a couple years ago
This really got me thinking if we were stranded out in the middle of nowhere. What exactly would it
Take to make some good clay that's exactly what we're exploring in this video today
Now to gather up the materials for this experiment today
I just went down to the local River and walk down beside the riverbed
I found a nice little place under the bridge where there's a lot of traffic
Took a second to enjoy the scenery and then started digging down into the dirt as close to the water as I felt comfortable
now the reason I went for dirt by the Riverbed is because clay is sedimentary which means it flows down to the lowest point and
Well, I actually have extracted clay from dirt from my backyard
I find
It's much better down by the river so take a trip down your local river grab some dirt
And you want to be looking for the dirt that when you squish it kind of has that plastic you feel it sticks together
Into one big clump, you can find something like that. You're well on your way to making clay so here
We are guys we've got a nice little amount of dirt here and the first thing we notice about it
Is it's not very clean. There's all kinds of rocks
There's sand there's little sticks and twigs this stuff is very very dirty and even though you can squish it and turn it into different
shapes
It's not super clean you can see all the organics and those large chunks of rocks sticking through
So to actually extract the clay out of this dirty mixture
we're going to need to put it through a very very simple process and the only thing is we're going to make that happen or
A couple of different containers and a little bit of water
So quick update guys you can see that
I just added a little bit of water to this mixture
And I use my glove just reach down there and stir it around
What we're actually doing is we're breaking up all the different pieces in the dirt itself. We've got rocks
We've got sand we've got clay we've got organic materials and what happens is as we mix it with water they separate their different layers
Now over time the clay and send all settle to the bottom so we want to do is stir this vigorously
I'll get everything suspended and then give it about five
Seconds to settle and then transfer all the liquid into a separate container watch what happens when I do
Sweet now if we stop pouring right here
You can see most of the heavy stuff is left. Behind if we look down the bucket. You can see gravel rocks everything
That's heavy you can even see a bit of sand left here on the bottom of the bucket so we can essentially take this stuff and we
Can throw it away because we're not going to need these big rocks for after now is all the stuff
That's contained in this liquid here now the second pass is Gonna be a little bit different
We need something like a strainer you could use your shirt you can use your socks or in this case
I'm just going to use a strainer for convenience
We're going to go ahead and clean out this container
Then we're gonna pour all this liquid through the strainer back into it and hopefully that will remove most of the organic material
Almost looks like concrete gravel
very cool
So I've washed and clean out this way bucket
We got our little strainer here as I said you can use your shirt or any kind of cloth material
We're just trying to strain out those organics, but remember that before we pour this solution through the strainer
It's very important to stir it up and agitate it so all those clay particles resuspend in the water once again
So you can see once we strained everything out
We've got quite a bit of organic material left behind we've got sticks leaves twigs anything that what's floating to the surface
and if you want to be extra cautious
You can go ahead and clean out your strainer and filter it one more time to catch anything you might miss
oh
Starting to look a little like chocolate milk
What's interesting about this is every time we pour it back and forth you notice
there's some kind of a
standing residue left behind that's because the sand is actually heavier than the clay and sinks down to the bottom is reporting it, so
theoretically now if we take two containers
And we simply transfer it back and forth and clean the stand out every time
Eventually most of that sand is going to be reduced. We're going to have a very fine clay. So here. We are guys
What we've got now is a bucket full of clay water essentially they had a little bit of sand we have
Used gravity and density of the materials inside to filter out the rocks
We've used a strainer to filter off most of the organic materials and so now we just have a solution of clay suspended in water
And the longer we let this sit the more of that sand and clay will drop down to the bottom now
We don't want the clay to actually settle down yet
We want to extract that first so I'm going to do now is use these two containers to cycle them back and forth and extract
the layers of Sand each time we do and
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back to making our clay
there we have a guys I poured this back and forth about four times taking out a little bit of fine sand each time we
Do now we can continue this process almost indefinitely
We're just at this point getting out some of that really fine silt, but right here
We have relatively clear relatively fine
Clay water and the only thing we really need to do with this now is set it down on a counter where it won't be
Disturbed for about an hour to give the layers a chance to separate just for fun
We had some leftover water, so I transfer that into another container
I'm just going to set these down right here, so we can watch them over a period of time and see how they settle
Quick update guys we've let this sit for about five hours now. You can see the clay is so fine
That's actually taking quite a bit of time for the water to rise up even to this level now if we let this sit for
Maybe a day or so, I'm sure that clay would compact even more we have more water on top however
There's a quicker way to extract water than that now the first thing
We need to do is get this water that we have on top off of the top and there's a few ways we can do
That we can simply tip it over and pour it out or we can use something like a siphon to try and suck it out
Now either option is going to have its pros and it's cons
But ultimately all we want to do is make sure we get this clay here without any of this stuff here
So first things first, I'm just going to take this tall glass here
We're going to just tip this over very slowly very carefully to get as much of that water off the top as we can
I'm just going to pour off the top layer that clay as well just to extract most of that water
And we'll call that right there pretty good
Most of that is going to be really fine clay. We can see it's very very moist
So we need to clean that up with a towel
Now the second method of extracting this water is siphoning it we can use this to suck the fluid up over here
But before it hits our mouth we can dump it over here and gravity will suck it everything out very similar to a vacuum cleaner
now to get even more of the moisture out of our clay we want to use something like a towel or a shirt something that's
Very tight-knit and has a lot of fibers in this case. I'm going to take this towel
I'm going to double it over on itself
we almost want to make a piece of fabric that the clay will not go through we want all of it to stay inside if
Possible so got a little makeshift filter here
We're going to pour these in hopefully
It's tight enough that will hold the clay inside so we can tie it up into a little ball
we can hang it up and let the
Atmosphere suck the moisture out of it for a few hours until we're just left with the clay itself
You can see this towel once
It's sucked down
but we don't want it to and hopefully this is thick enough that it's not actually going to
Go through the towel itself. We want to be able to pick this up and to be very little if anything
Coming through the bottom of the bucket
we want it to all stand side so it's looking pretty good so far might even want to clamp that down obviously in the
Wild in nature you wouldn't have clamps, but you can improvise us something else
We just don't want the towel to actually suck down into the bucket here. We go with the round two
Starting to get heavy now
Beautiful there we go. There's all our clay in our towel
And we're just going to fold this up tie it off and hang it for a bit
Now if everything goes well, we want to take all the edges of this towel fold them all together
And make a nice little ball of liquid look. I just fill in. It's okay. We can save it
There we go. It's looking very good very good
All right, so we got our slipknot set and now all I have to do is shake it. Shake it. Shake. Shake it shake it
Doesn't have to be clean this has to be functional
There, what do you think?
All right, so this is pretty much what we're going for guys
We got our clay wrapped up inside the towel, and you can see some moisture dripping off
But a lot of that is relatively clean water
It doesn't have the clay in it because the clay is being trapped by the fibers on the inside of cloth
Now if we just let this hang out for a couple of hours most that moisture is going to come out
We should be left with a nice ball of clay
Alright guys. We are back
It's been about an hour now since we took our bag outside and let it hang off of the railing
now in the interest of time
I actually did squeeze the bag a little bit to help encourage a little bit of that moisture to come out a little bit quicker
In doing so I sacrificed a little bit of the clay itself, but I don't think that's going to jeopardize the proof-of-concept
so here we are with our towel with most of the water squeezed out of it if we open up something now and take a
Look inside
You can see a lot of the clay on the upper Edges has started to harden up
And it's very plastic the stuff on the inside though is still really liquidy. It's kind of like runny
Diarrhea if we left this out exposed to the air eventually that moisture would evaporate and the clay would become hard
However, there is a way. We can speed things up
There's a way we can cheat and all we need is a little bit of paper towel
All we're going to do is rip off a few sheets of paper towel fold it in half I'm going to stick it down on
The table like this then we're going to scoop up our clay put it down the center of our paper towel
And we're basically just going to flatten it out
The paper towel is going to absorb a lot of the moisture out of the clay and as soon as it reaches the consistency
We're looking for we can peel off the paper towel and wrap our clay in Saran wrap or plastic bag for later use
now again
If you don't have a paper towel all you have to do is just let this sit out in the open air a little bit
Longer and let it evaporate on its own, but we're just using this technique to speed the process up a bit
I'm just going to take a couple more sheets of paper towel
Lay them over top and help flatten it out from the top side
To help absorb the moisture a little bit quicker from up here as well, and now as easy as that
Oh, wow. I love this part peel this back and take a look at this we have some very nice
beautiful
ready-to-Use clay it just sealed off and
Mold in the palm of your hand that
Is amazing this stuff is very moldable. It's very easy to work with very plastic
You could use this to make a little bowl a little pot a little dish pretty much anything you want if you have a countertop
With a smooth surface you can go ahead and throw it down in the countertop and just work it around a little bit
Help work out any of the bubbles the cracks the crevices and things of that nature
Now if your clay gets a little bit, too
dry you can add a little bit more water in to work it around to make a little more plastic in the other hand if
it's too wet you can just let it stand out in the open air for a couple hours to let it evaporate and
Harden up by itself now before we did this experiment today?
I went down to the river and I got a lot more of this river mud
And I let it stand in Five-gallon buckets over a period of three days
And I turned it into this now this piece of clay
I worked back and forth a little bit more
I got more of the sand out and I let it sit overnight
Until all the water had come to the top made a little bit easier to work with and you can feel
If you just run your finger along the side of this it almost feels rubbery
It's got a very plastic texture to it if we carve into it with something like a fork or a spoon
You can see how it just peels away now
You can work this you can roll it you can use it to make pottery
dishes pretty much anything you want if you were to fire this in an oven or a kiln the right temperature you turn it into
Pottery like a Terracotta planter pot and possibly even ceramic
So here you have it guys we have successfully turned river mud into blocks of clay that we can now use turn into pottery
Earthenware and possibly fire into ceramic all things we're going to try to do in future project videos
Let's quickly Recap. How we got here
We started this project this morning by going down to the river and pulling dirt and rocks straight out of the Riverbank?
We brought the dirt home
We stuck it in a bucket of water, and we swirled it around until everything was broken up
Then we let it sit for a few seconds and poured all that dirty water into a second container our first
Observation was that everything heavy was left behind all the rocks the pebbles and most of the heavy sand next we grabbed a strainer
We poured all the water through that to help pull off any organic materials like leaves sticks or anything floating on the top
Which in a survival situation would also work with a piece of clothing like your shirt?
We transferred the water back and forth a few times
Trying to get out as much of the sentence we could and we're left with a very dirty grey water, which we eventually
Transferred into a towel
Pulled up at all four ends to form a ball then tied off with a piece of string and let hang on the railing we
Let it sit outside for about an hour then we squeeze the bag to help get rid of any excess moisture where we brought inside
Open up the towel and saw that we had a very slushy clay
We transferred that clay to a paper towel to absorb even more moisture
Scraped it off and ended up with this a nice ball of clay that we can turn into anything we want
So there you have it guys that is how you go down to the river take the mud and turn it into a fairly
Processed clay at home what we end up doing with this stuff is completely up to you
So let me know what you want to see down in the comments below. Thanks for joining us for this experiment today
We'll be looking for you the next one Doc you then?
Okay, guys a quick reminder. There's a link down in the description right now to get yourself a casper mattress
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Remember use the promo code the king of random to get $50 off the mattress of your choice. Good night sleep tight
You can see right out of towel. Oh there
It makes a pretty nice moldable clay as easy as that it really does look like chocolate milk
And clay is not really that bad for your diet. No. It's really really bad. Don't drink it you can put it on your face